Securely Sharing Neuroimagery

Abstract

Shared scientific data, such as neuroimagery, offers great benefits to science. However, data owners must exercise custodial responsibilities which can conflict with the unhindered sharing of their data. Given simple choices of sharing widely or not at all, the result will frequently be no sharing. We hypothesize that neuroimagery sharing will be enhanced if data owners are provided with well-defined intermediate levels of data visibility. In this paper, we describe a broadly applicable data sharing model, Structured Sharing Communities (SSC), in which data becomes incrementally visible to communities structured as a complete partial-order; the associated properties of Privacy and Fairness regulate access to shared data. Within SSC, a customized policy space is defined capturing the sharing relationships among specific collaborators.